Chapter Eleven Aurora / Joshua #2
And when I glanced over at her. She was watching the field like she always did. But this time her posture wasn’t small, wasn’t curling in on itself. She had relaxed just a little. Like she’d been carrying their fear too, and when mine broke, hers did too.
I exhaled slowly, passing the ball off. This girl is taking over me, and I keep letting her. God, if only she knew how fucking weak I am for her and her stupid lopsided smiley face.
Minutes bled into drills, drills into hours, until sweat was stinging my eyes and my body moved on nothing but muscle memory.
The whistle finally tore from my lips, sharp, final.
Practice over. The sound should’ve settled me, but it didn’t.
It only rattled inside my skull, bouncing around with the image I couldn’t seem to scrub away. Her.
She wasn’t even looking at me. She was looking somewhere else. I followed her gaze and felt the fire she had cooled two hours ago crawling back. It’s him. Miles. Him again.
I watched his jog slow down into that easy saunter as he reached her. That smile. Effortless, wide, patient. And worse? She gives it back. A shy one. Like his presence was her natural blush.
The others were stretching, laughing, and collapsing on the turf with sweat dripping down their faces. They were making jokes and laughing among themselves while I was here, burning all by myself again.
Behind him were two more people. The Aly girl and Matthew Gray, another familiar face, another rich golden boy. They were talking about something, completely oblivious to how close Miles was to my fucking girl.
Why isn’t she next to her? Why isn’t she taking care of her friend? Aurora clearly finds it hard being around new people—for fuck's sake.
I watched their every movement. From Miles standing too close, to Matthew leaning down to her while introducing himself.
These fuckers are treating her as if she were deaf, always standing too fucking close, leaning down, breathing in her personal space.
My jaw ground. My vision narrowed. Every single sound—the players talking, cleats stomping, someone uncapping a water bottle—it all drowned out under one steady thrum: mine, mine, mine.
She didn’t know it, but she was mine. Always had been. Always would be. And now she was giving him… them, what she never gave me. Her voice. Her attention. Her soft fucking smile.
I couldn’t stop staring at Miles’s hand brushing hers as he pointed at something in her notebook.
Couldn’t stop imagining his fingers sliding into hers, holding her.
My chest burned. My lungs felt too tight.
And then she looked at him. Really looked.
Like he was someone safe. Someone she could… trust.
My body moved before my brain did. I set the ball down. Stepped back. Line it up.
And I kicked.
Hard.
The sound—BANG.
The ball slammed against the bleachers right by her head. Loud. Violent. Sharp enough to make her flinch so hard that she dropped everything in her arms. The papers scattered, her yelp cuts through the air, and her whole body curled in on itself as if I just shot a bullet instead of a ball.
Every single head snapped up.
Miles stiffened, and so did Matthew. Aly froze mid-sentence, staring.
But me? I just lowered my foot back down, rolled my shoulders, and walked.
No explanation. No apology. I just kept walking.
I didn’t turn back, but I felt it. Their eyes.
Her shock. Their questions. The silence trailed after me like smoke.
Good. Let them feel it. Let her feel it. She belongs to me, and I will make sure everyone knows before she knows it herself.
—
I didn’t go to the locker room. I went to the bathroom and locked myself in a stall like a coward.
The metal click of the latch sounded too loud, like an accusation. The fluorescent light hummed above, buzzing into the raw silence I’d carried in my chest for years.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the cold tile, back pressed to the stall door, knees up, fingers splayed over my chest because I couldn’t think of where else to put them.
Fuck. I scared her.
The image replayed in my head in ugly little looped frames: the ball sailing, the splintering bang, her hand jerking, the papers exploding from her grip like birds.
Her yelp—small and human, full of shock—the sound I’d been dying for and that I’d never deserved. I’d wanted that sound to be for me, to be soft and surrendered and mine. Instead, I’d manufactured it. I’d made her flinch.
My breath came out in ragged, shallow pulls. I squeezed my eyes shut until black shapes spun behind my lids. That little noise she made lodged itself under my ribs, a stone that scraped and would not move.
I had just pushed a boundary I’d sworn not to cross, all because I couldn’t stand someone else making her smile the way she smiled now.
My chest hurt in new, unfamiliar ways.
The ache wasn’t just fury or hunger. It was the double-edged thing you feel when you realise you’ve become the kind of person you swore you wouldn’t be.
A small, awful knowledge settled: I’d done to her what my life had taught me to do to keep from being abandoned, hurt first, so I wouldn’t be hurt differently. I’d used fear as a leash.
I pressed my forehead to my knees and tried to breathe like someone had taught me in some other, quieter life. Slow in. Slow out.
The method didn’t care about the mess of my intentions. It only took the air and gave it back. I counted the breaths because counting tricked the brain out of—out of whatever spiral I was tail-spinning in.
The stone in my chest shifted. Regret rose like bile. If she’d run, if she’d run away this time, what would I have done? What would I do?
The thought of that possibility squeezed something raw and hot behind my chest. I would not survive her leaving because of me. The idea was not theoretical. It was a weight.
I would fix what I could. I would swallow whatever pride I had left.
I would stop pretending that distance and cold were the same as protection.
I would—God help me—figure out how to reach her in a way that didn’t frighten her.
I would learn to be the man who could earn the right to stand in her world without breaking it.
It was ridiculous, but if she left me—if she fucking left me, I would have nothing left. Nothing.
How could I even imagine a world without her in it?
Without her looking at me and knowing I existed, that I was here, seeing her. Really seeing her the way no other man could. The way no other people could. We both have lived in the same darkness for so long; she can’t leave me here alone.
I stood up. My knees ached. My hands were slick. I wiped them on my shorts and unlocked the stall with fingers that shook, then pushed the metal door and stepped back into the bright, noisy bathroom.
The mirror above the sinks reflected a face I barely recognised: too pale, eyes rimmed red from something like a fever, guilt, maybe, or the realisation that I’d finally cracked something I couldn’t glue back together with silence.
I pushed through the bathroom door like a man trying to shove his skin back on, too tight, raw, wrong. But there she was. Right in front of me. Eyes still wide, laced with fear as her hands shook, gripping onto something familiar.
Fuck, my jacket. I forgot it. Her note was in there, too; I hope it didn’t fall out when she picked it up. Or worse, I hope she didn’t take it out, thinking I didn’t deserve it anymore.
Aly was a few feet behind her, eyes burning a hole into me.
Her posture said a hundred things without a sound: Don’t.
Don’t you dare. Miles’s jaw was tight. Matthew stood like a statue about to move.
How fucking dare they… how dare they think they can protect her better than—shit.
I don’t even have the right to say me. Especially after what I did minutes earlier.
But they… they don’t know her. They met her this week; I knew her from when she came, when she stepped foot into Silverwood. Even Aly, even she can’t—fuck. I can’t accept this shit. What happened to us? Just us and no one else? Why are people coming into her life and taking her from me?
My hands—my stupid, filthy hands—wanted to grab her, to take her into whatever safety I had left. Instead, I watched her lift the hoodie, watched her fingers brush the fabric where my chest would be.
The sight should have softened me. Her gentleness should have been a knife of shame I could use to cut myself into better—better for her. But the feeling that rose was not tenderness. It was something knotted and ugly and animal that I hated myself for smelling.
She held the hoodie out. Her voice might have said something—I couldn’t hear it—but the way her lips moved made me want to memorise the shape of the words. My throat tightened as if preparing to swallow something poisonous.
I took the hoodie from her hand. The fabric smelled like her now. Detergent and a sort of ordinary kindness I hadn’t earned.
I glanced back for a second and saw that Miles, fucking Miles, shifted, like he wanted to step forward and put himself between us.
Like he always has to be her fucking protector.
If it were someone else—Matthew, if it was fucking Matthew, then I wouldn’t care as much, but Miles?
A guy who would use her, add her to his list of toys and move on? Fuck no.
My jaw worked. Heat flared in my chest. She was being nice. Still. After everything. After the ball. After the mud. After the humiliation I had built into her life. She was still being kind.
Everything inside me clattered. The man I used to be, small, desperate, tidy with his hate, wanted to tear that kindness to shreds to prove that nothing soft could last. The other part of me, the part I never let anyone see, felt like it would break if she smiled again at anyone who wasn’t me.
So I said it because saying anything softer would have been dangerous. Because if I said sorry, I’d admit I’d crossed a line. If I asked her to stay, I’d be begging. If I kept quiet, I might wither into some hollow man, and I couldn’t bear that either.
“You’re a pathetic saint,” I said, and the words were flat, bitter, precise. Not loud enough to draw the whole field, but not quiet either. Enough for them to register, enough for her skin to prick.
I saw immediate confusion flash across her face, hurt mixed with the same bewildered kindness she could never seem to stop offering. She didn’t look angry. She looked stunned, like she couldn’t reconcile my cruelty with whatever she’d expected back.
I didn’t wait for an answer. I turned my back because staying would mean saying something else, something worse, something I couldn’t take back.
Walking away was the safest humiliation I could give myself, remove myself from her immediate world so maybe she could breathe again, even if my chest hollowed with the sound of loss.
I kept walking until the distance swallowed my weight and left me with nothing but the taste of the knowledge that in trying to cage her life to protect myself, I’d only taught myself how to bruise what I wanted most.